"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"for 20 March 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.

The Jawbone of a Scare Quote

When newspaper reporters, magazine scribes and novelists need to put
themselves next to a recent-vintage euphemism  but still want you-the-reader
to know that, although some may refer to it as "maize," we at least know it's
corn  they turn to that most slippery of journalistic practices: They pat
the phrase on the back and send it on its way bundled up in scare quotes.

Scare quotes are the quotation marks found around phrases like "gangsta rap,"
"shame spiral," or "security zone": coinages that may be lingo, that may be
jargon, that may even be slang but are more likely excuses where a little
distance is in order. The subject of the story may say it's "the truth," but
we say it's spinach and  ya know what?  to hell with it. Scare quotes throw a
net around the ideas and assertions media culture hasn't absorbed yet, stuff
journalism's jobholders may even be a little afraid of.

At their bare minimum, scare quotes nudge their readers into unwanted
disbelief. Across the nation, grammatically challenged merchants use
quotation marks to make phrases seem more exciting.
Once you've read a sign in the supermarket that says, "Hot Dogs"
on sale, can you ever really believe anything again? Having walked past a
sign reading Leo's "Barbershop," on subsequent passes will you ever
not
question what's really going on in there? If the corporate outlets that are
helping all the "ho-made" Donut shops (which are open "Sunday")
lose their
leases really wanted to glom onto some authenticity, they'd put up signs reading
Au Bon "Pain" or Starbucks "Chain Store."
You'd wonder. Admit it. Is it
really a chain store?

It's the same thing in the newspaper. The subject of a news story may believe his
"reality" is ours, and for the sake of letting the guy have his say or
because the writer is infatuated but can't commit, he's usually willing to
go with his subject's usage for now. The scare quotes let you know the jury's
still out  the euphemism may become reality if it's tenacious enough to get
the nod from the dictionary someday or to shed the scare quotes in the paper.
A reader caught The New York Times at this practice in its 5 May 1993 edition and used
Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" as the bag of oranges for the
beatdown. The Gray Lady had suddenly dropped the scare quotes around the obvious
doublespeak "ethnic cleansing," thereby legitimizing a term for genocide
favored by killers looking to cast their murderous policies in a less sinister
light. The upshot is that today we all know what ethnic cleansing is, and
"genocide" somehow seems a PC fallback-word for whiners. The terms have
changed places and the legit description now reads as suspect. That wasn't
genocide  the numbers just weren't there. (Note that italics can be used in
scare-fashion, too, but nobody wants to use the unwieldy term scare italics
so you don't see them as much.)

The style guides published by big newspapers don't ignore how quotation
marks can be used for ironic effect; they reveal that there are lots of
reasons to use scare quotes but insist that in every case they should be
used sparingly  the soul must be searched before a writer goes so far as
to encase something so indirect in quotation marks. What style guides
ignore is the term scare quotes itself, even though the phrase has been
journalistic parlance for years. And everybody knows it, even Newsweek.
Writing in an article called "Lichtenstein on the Line" in its 18 October
1993 issue, Peter Plagens took journalism's shiv out of its sock even as
he kept it at arm's length. He put the scare quotes in scare quotes:
[Lichtenstein] not only helped invent a new, contagious style, but was
instrumental in putting "scare quotes" around the whole idea of art.

Yet the term isn't mentioned in The New York Times' heavy-duty instruction
manual, nor in The Washington Post Deskbook on Style; not in the slim volume
the Associated Press puts out or The Chicago Manual of Style or any of
the various MLA guides. Even dictionaries ignore it. Neither Webster's nor
Random House admits the term into its pages, although Random House tells
us that a "scarehead" is "a headline in exceptionally large type" and that
it's also known as a "screamer." It dates from around 1885, and it's good
to at least find out that "scarehead" and "screamer" are synonyms. In no
volume of the Barnhart Dictionary Companion  an instrument so thorough it
sees fit to include not only "soccer mom" but "soccer dad"  do we find an
entry for "scare quotes." Only online at dictionary.com and dict.org,
products of Princeton University's WorldNet, can a definition for "scare
quote"  singular  be found: A scare quote is the use of quotation marks to
indicate that it is not the author's preferred terminology.

Not the author's preferred terminology. A force from outside is making
itself known; the author, who, after all, does know where shingles come
from, is being pitchforked by hillbillies into calling a perfectly
obvious cypress a "skinnybone tree." For scare quotes, even when invoked
to lend authority or simply to point out that someone actually did say
it that way, always call the phrase between them into question. Take
The Washington Post's example of scare-quoting "coined or specialized
words not readily understood": The train was "deadheaded"  it carried no
passengers. Since the definition also explains the proclivity for songs about
trains among the people who make up the noun form of deadhead, it's a
lot more charged than the Post's admittedly unsubtle example of scare-quote
irony: The "mansion" she told us about turned out to be a three-room cottage.

The MLA Style Manual instructs academics to "place quotation marks around
a word or phrase given in someone else's sense or in a special sense or
purposefully misused." Its example  Teachers often make use of visual
"texts" from current exhibits at the college's art gallery.  proves how
seriously scholars take the MLA. If every academic who's used the word
"text" to mean "something that technically isn't a text but, you know,
for me it's a text" put it in scare quotes, there wouldn't be enough
quotation marks left in the language for professors to put around words
like natural, original, and the Great in Great Books.

The Associated Press gives in to irony as well but adds that "unfamiliar
terms" need inverted commas, too  but only on first reference: Broadcast
frequencies are measured in "kilohertz." It doesn't want people scratching
their heads over oddball collections of consonants and vowels like "kilohertz."
I mean, what is that  metric? It sounds foreign. I'm not gonna go around
measuring frequency cycles in thousands per second, no sir. I'm gonna do
it the way I learned it in school, the way my father and my grandfather
did it: in pounds. Here, scare quotes familiarize and domesticate as much
as they estrange and call into question. More important, they alleviate
the need to write "so-called" all the time.

The Post Deskbook mentions that coined names in classical music need quotes
too: Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" Suite. Because of what we're used to seeing
in scare quotes, it makes it seem somewhat bumpkin-ish to refer to that work
that way  it's what you people who only listen to classical music once a year
call the "Nutcracker"  but in this case it's appropriate and reassuring:
Don't worry, readers, nobody's nuts are really gonna get cracked tonight,
even if it is a ballet.

The Deskbook goes on to list other use-them-if-you-have-to applications
for scare quotes: for key phrases in attributed quotations ("dirty spy"
is its example, as opposed to just "spy") and for terms that are
subjective or  using scare quotes to define scare quotes  "loaded": the
schools were "separate but equal"; South African "homelands." Mostly
the Deskbook feels a little exasperated about the whole scare quote thing.
"It is better to let words convey meaning than to rely on typographical
devices," it concludes, explaining why Guillaume Apollinaire never really
made it as a newspaperman. Indeed, ours is an era that would rather not rely
on "typographical devices"  but finds it has to.

A quick look at the day's papers proves it. Even The New York Times can't
help but indulge, albeit apologetically. There, the strategy is scare
quotes once-removed, attributions only. From 24 February, under the headline
"Utah Senate Approves Bill to Fight Polygamist Crimes": Mr. Allen said the
extra money and resources were needed because there should be more aggressive
investigations and prosecutions, which have to penetrate what he called
"secret communities." The Times didn't label those wayward Mormons as belonging to "secret
communities"; it was one of their own who did it.